Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - New Chemistry Building [PAGE 41]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

confine ourselves to trying to take it away from the seaweed, instead of learning what the seaweed knows about getting it from the water? You may look supercilious, but until a large number of chemists have studied semipermeable membranes, there will always be this lack of understanding of those simple reactions of living matter going on around us. There will always seem to me a possibility of doing such physical and chemical things more nearly as we may wish to do them, when we know.how they operate. When nothing new is being done by us it will be a sure token of our decay. When we stop increasing our experimental activities or fall for a considerable time behind the activities of other countries, we may expect to see our light become merely a memory, like that of Greece or Rome. Thus far we Americans have not reached a fair average as investigators in natural sciences, and yet we have incomparably superior conditions for the growth of research. I cannot look beyond the period when research shall cease in a country and still imagine that country a power in the world. There are no sharp lines to be drawn through research to separate pure from applied, scientific from practical, useful from useless. If one attempts to divide past research in such a manner, he finds that time entirely rubs out his lines of demarcation. At this particular time, however, one may imagine a more or less zigzag zone which serves to divide research in a commonly accepted way. I will illustrate. In a manufactory the price of a new product should include the cost of research. No matter how complicated the system, this is always true. Otherwise the industry would ultimately commit suicide. In practice it is common to apportion to particular products the cost of their separate development, and to fix the price so that within a reasonable time, or by a reasonable volume of sales, the so-called development cost may be wiped out. Thereafter the product may be sold on the basis of the continuing cost of actual production. While this system is extensive, it does not cover the cost of many of those original researches which may have been absolutely' necessary. The argon tungsten lamp, in its development cost, did not carry the expenses of Rayleigh and Ramsay's work, and there will probably always be such classification of research work necessary.

(38)